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Film · United Artists · 1978

Coming Home

Name: Coming Home scores 49 — Live Historic
Item: Coming Home
Rating: 49
Author: Live Historic

49Watch it awake.

The affair is the plot. The hospital is the point. Adults. Do not confuse the two.

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The review

Hal Ashby's film won its argument in 1978: that the men coming home were not the men on the recruiting poster, and that a veterans' hospital was a place a country was hiding. Jon Voight's Luke is bitter, funny, and paralyzed. Jane Fonda's Sally is a captain's wife who has never had to look at any of it. Bruce Dern's husband comes home later, to a house that has changed its mind about the war and about him.

Adults. I will not pretend the affair is the moral center. A wound does not dissolve a marriage, and the film is too pleased with the dissolution. Watch it for the ward, for the man who says the quiet part about what his body is now, and for the husband who comes home to a story that has no room for him. Then say which of those three the film shortchanges.

Journal

Keep Coming Home in the record.

No house has filed a sentence for this yet.

Live Historic number 49. Yours can differ.

The glance

Household and Piety and Temperance are the thin ones.

Is a marriage, a parent, or a child a real life here, or just a prop?

This phone is set for a grown person, just me. Change the ages.

Consider this

Memphis Belle

60 instead of 49

Memphis Belle is still a war film, and it scores 60 instead of 49. What you gain is temperance: The raid is the plot.

The eight

6
Industry
Hospital work, the unglamorous kind, is what puts her in the room where the war actually is.
4
Household
A marriage and then a second loyalty. The film is more interested in the awakening than in the vow.
3
Piety
Tenderness stands in for faith. The film does not look past the two people.
6
Courage
His courage is living in the chair and then saying, in public, what the war was.
6
Republic
The protest at the end is a speech a country needed to hear from a man in a chair, and it is still a speech.
3
Temperance
The romance is the appetite. The film wants you to approve it because he is wounded.
6
Truth
The hospital detail is true to 1968. The love story is arranged.
5
Stewardship
What it leaves is a picture of the wounded, and a permission slip the picture did not need.

Where to watch

Finding the page.

Live Historic · Coming Home · 49IMDb tt0077362

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Film · Disney · 1954

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

49Watch it awake.

A boy can watch the ship, but the captain is not a clean hero.

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The review

A boy can watch most of it, which is why the captain needs a sentence before you start. A professor, a harpooner, and a sailor are taken aboard a submarine by a man who has declared war on warships. The ship is a wonder. It is also a weapon. An island and a squid are the adventures people keep.

He is not a clean hero. The men he took did not choose his war. I liked the ship the way a child likes a machine, and I do not want that to be the whole talk. Say the weapon part out loud. The hour is a Disney adventure with a private war sitting in the middle of the dive.

Journal

Keep 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea in the record.